Devon Ford - The Fall

Sixty-six hundred miles away, another man had received a phone call. After listening intently to the information, he replaced the handset and leaned back to look up into the expectant faces of a half-dozen uniformed officers and one mysterious woman in a dark suit. The intelligence services wore no rank or insignia, and offered no names—only their department. That opened any door, and removed all but the most secure of resistance to their questions.

Speaking rapidly but strongly in Mandarin, he gave a short speech and issued orders.

“The operation is about to proceed as planned,” he said, feeling the nervous tension in the room. “To your duties,” he ordered, and the office emptied leaving only a black-suited woman. She approached the man at the desk, intimidating him with her sheer presence.

“You are sure of this?” she asked, the threat of failure evident in her tone.

“Yes,” he replied, meeting her gaze as though he truly believed his answer. “By tomorrow we will have crippled them and their eyes will be facing elsewhere,” he said, showing her a clenched fist to emphasize his point.

“Atteeeeen-HUH,” called the master sergeant. Major Taylor walked into the hangar-sized building flanked by his junior officers to the sound of his brigade stamping their boots.

“At ease,” he called out, removing his cap and surveying the front rank of his troops decked out in full battle gear.

“You know what we are doing here will be called treason by some,” he said, as though everyone present didn’t realize the danger of the mission. “Anyone wishing to stand down has my permission to do so now. You will not be punished, but you will be confined to barracks under guard until the mission is complete.” He let that hang, watching his assembled force for any sign of hesitation.

Every man and woman, every soldier under his command, stared resolutely forward. He took that as a sign that nobody had second thoughts.

“Okay then. Team one is under the command of Captain Anderson, the rest are with me as QRF. Let’s move out!”

Taylor replaced his cap and turned to the passenger side of the command Humvee. His battle helmet was on the seat and he switched the cap for the ballistic protection. Dressed similarly to his troops, including the M4 propped against the seat, his decision to lead the quick reaction force gave him an element of removal from the mission which gave him better oversight. He trusted Anderson to do his duty, and the hand-picked members of team one had his total faith. The big engine gunned and rolled out, followed by the second Humvee and the three troop carriers behind.

Rodriguez halted his truck just inside the entrance to the Holland tunnel and hit the four-way flashers. He checked his watch, closed the door of the cab and walked away. A dozen other small trucks were doing the same all over the city, and each stranded vehicle, one by one, caught fire from the incendiary device buried in the load of waste PVC plastic. Within minutes, almost every major route in and out of the city was a panicked mess of boiling black smoke and toxic fumes.

Leland checked his watch and held his breath as the seconds ticked down. His watch was analogue, a relic he had to wind up daily, but it kept good time and wouldn’t be affected by what was about to happen. Glancing up at the skyline of Wall Street, he muttered a single word to himself.

“Go.”

At the precise moment it was supposed to, the timer attached to the suitcase-sized EMP buried deep in the bowels of the exchange ticked to zero, and a loud click echoed amongst the whirring banks of flashing lights. A strange hum reverberated through the air, almost imperceptibly, and the banks of computers went dark all at once.

Upstairs on the trading floor, where sweat-covered men and women shouted to one another with phones pressed to their ears, the lights went out. The computers stopped working and blinked into oblivion, and the noise first rose in intensity to a deafening crescendo, then fell to a grumbling as they all waited for the backup power to come online and reboot the world market.

Seconds ticked by and nothing happened. Voices began to rise to demand the power come back on, as though rude indignation and the feeling that time was money could will it to happen. Still nothing happened.

The collective intelligence of everyone on the floor failed to grasp that their machines were not going to come back to life, and they milled about in confusion like chickens in a coop waiting to be fed.

A muted crack and an answering rumble penetrated the sounds inside the building, causing a moment of silence before shouted questions began to pierce the grumbling.

Outside, just as Cal was trying to get the right angle for his selfie, the screen of his phone unexpectedly went black. Frowning, he tried to turn it back on without success. He cursed the phone, the manufacturers, and everything else as he had just seen the battery indicator showing 88 percent before it died. Reverting to the most British of approaches when dealing with faulty technology, he tried to hit it twice and turn it on again without success.

Just as he was coming to terms that he was now in the dark ages and cut off from the world he accessed through the phone, he glanced around to see almost everyone else doing the same.

Hang on, he thought, that can’t be right.

Just as the realization hit home that something had affected the entire area and not singled him out to ruin his day, a loud crack rang out from a nearby street.

He couldn’t have known, but a trash can had exploded on the street, killing six pedestrians outright and blowing out the plate glass windows of all the nearby stores in great shards. Smoke rose from the explosion and caused instant panic.

Cal had ducked instinctively at the sudden noise, not having heard anything similar for many years but never forgetting the sound. As vivid as his distant memory was when it came to explosions and war, the city of New York had a far more intense collective memory when it came to terror attacks.

Fearing the reactions of the people more than the explosion, Cal turned and began walking fast in the opposite direction, desperate to get off the street as a second sound reached his ears. The unmistakable whoosh of a rocket and the answering crack of a second explosion ripped the air.

It was definitely time to get the hell out of there.

A woman with her hoodie pulled up hiding her face in shadow skipped down the steps of the subway station, her backpack bouncing uncomfortably as its heavy load impacted her lower back. Slipping it from her shoulders, she flicked a switch on the top and surreptitiously dropped it at the side of a trash can. The subway was so busy, and everyone but the crazies avoided eye contact, so it was a simple thing to do and remain unnoticed. Jumping through the sliding doors of the train about to depart, she flicked back her hood and checked her watch.

Captain Michael Anderson led his troops along Washington Avenue and right up to the gates of the power plant.

“Sir, you need to evacuate this facility immediately,” he barked at the guard on the gate, brandishing a blank sheet of paper as though it were his authority to demand action.

Act like you own the place, his father had once told him before he left home to join the military, and remember it’s only you who will know that you don’t have the authority.

So now he did just that, and all his bluster, urgency and authority terrified the guard. He didn’t know what to do first, but before he could even formulate any answer Anderson snapped at him again.